72 new york | july 22–august 4, 2019
a society is measured by how it treats its most vulnerable,
which is why images of suffering or injured children feature so
prominently in accounts of human-rights abuses: Even the most cal-
loused or bigoted onlooker has a tough time saying, “Well, they brought
this on themselves.” (Offered an opportunity to scold kids in cages at the
border, our vice-president opted to blame the Democrats.) Deaths of chil-
dren are at the heart of two graphically violent new movies, Jennifer
Kent’s Australian-frontier revenge thriller, The Nightingale, and Waad
al- Kateab and Edward Watts’s first-person documentary of the siege of
Aleppo, For Sama—Sama being Waad’s baby daughter, whose existence
haunts Waad as she films her husband (one of the few doctors remaining
in East Aleppo) attempting to save yet another bomb-mangled child. In
their vastly different ways, both films imply that to look away from the
atrocities onscreen would be an act of historical cowardice. They shame
you into bearing witness for the sake of the children.
But I did overcome my shame and look away from some images in The
Nightingale, in part because it’s fictional and in part because it’s shaped like
a meathead melodrama—though with odd last-act
dissonances that might reflect Kent’s ambivalence.
The setting is colonial Australia, on what’s now Tas-
mania, where the English use Irish prisoners as
slaves and “civilize” the native population by exter-
minating it. The title character, Clare (Aisling Fran-
ciosi), is an Irish lass made to sing before a platoon
of British soldiers, who listen to her beauteous trillsPerry, makes like the world’s most passive-
aggressive amateur sleuth, provoking all the
women with insinuations, insults, and
point-blank queries in hopes of proving that
her boy’s death was intentional. Season two
wasn’t unwatchable; in fact, despite many
nonsensical developments, it was compel-
ling because of the returning cast plus
Streep, who turned in one of those weird,
prankish, coloring-outside-the-lines per-
formances that Marlon Brando and Jack
Nicholson started giving once they fully
committed to being character actors.
Laughing inappropriately as a form of emo-
tional terrorism, filtering a Northern Cali-
fornia singsong accent through pinched
prosthetic teeth that she requested for the
part, and unleashing a primal scream of
maternal grief at a family dinner, Streep’s
Mary Louise was pitiable and terrifying,
dismantling the show in order to save it.
And it did need saving. From the start,
something about this season felt off. Kelley’s
writing always leaned on saucy exposition,
but here it sometimes seemed as if every
scene was delivering payloads of pertinent
facts. And the show’s copious art-house-
style flashbacks—a Vallée signature—often
felt intrusive or obligatory; at the very least,
they were less intriguing than some of the
long close-ups that observed the characters
in moments of distress, at times even stay-
ing on a woman’s face without cutting to the
person talking to her (as in a therapy scene
that ends with a long reaction shot of
Celeste processing questions asked by her
therapist, played by Robin Weigert, whom
we barely see). The latter is more common
in Arnold’s work, whereas Vallée is more
restless with his images. But cinematic
forensics will take viewers only so far in
their attempt to figure out who did what
and whether the season’s moments of inspi-
ration and stiltedness are attributable to
one creative person or a combination—as
well as when in the production timeline the
creative decision might’ve been made.
This type of offscreen drama is common
in the, well, sausage factory of series TV,
and it’s unfortunately an equal-opportunity
indignity, one that every director for hire,
even a multiple Cannes Jury Prize winner
like Arnold, knows is a possibility when he
or she signs up for this kind of gig. In con-
trast to theatrical cinema, which is still
mainly a director’s medium, a TV show is
driven by a writer-producer who either has
some background in directing or else hires
people to keep the look and sound of a
show consistent over multiple hours. It’s
common for parts of episodes, and in some
cases whole episodes, to be reshot by a dif-
ferent director, or reedited by a new editor
or team of editors, either because the show-
runners didn’t like the original filmmaker’s
work or because they decided to change key
elements of the story and the people who
had done the previous version weren’t
available. Only an agreed-upon stylistic
template prevents the aesthetic of a show
from becoming cluttered or inconsistent.
Ultimately, this method of production isn’t
hugely different from the old Hollywood
studio system, where a film like Gone With
the Wind could have multiple directors
even though the end product named only
one. Under these sorts of conditions, egos
get bruised, sometimes bloodied. But it’s
rare for ugly details to spill out immediately
into the public sphere, as they have with
Big Little Lies. Usually, you have to wait for
a tell-all book.
The optics of this scandal are uniquely
bad, though, because Arnold was suppos-
edly hired to give the show a distinctive vibe
that would distinguish it from the work of
Vallée, and she was brought in to succeed
him in part because of criticisms that a
show driven by female characters, and co-
executive-produced by two of its leads(Witherspoon and Kidman), should have a
woman behind the camera. Kelley and
Vallée allegedly took Arnold’s work away
from her without warning and substantially
reedited the season to make it more like
season one. Episodic directors get to submit
the first cut of an episode, but they always
do so knowing that executive producers
may reedit or reshoot according to what
they believe are the needs of the show. The
question isn’t whether the showrunners
have the legal right to do what they did here,
because it’s standard practice on most
shows. The question is whether they should
have, whether their treatment of Arnold
illustrated the same problem that hiring
Arnold was intended to solve, and whether
the series is as interesting as it would’ve
been if they’d left her work alone. Whether
sexism was intended or incidental doesn’t
matter when the result is a behind-the-
scenes story of a brilliant woman who was
denied agency—not entirely unlike the
Monterey women whose stories she was
entrusted with telling. ■Lady Vengeance
In The Nightingale, the director
of The Babadook returns
with a tale of real-life monsters.
MOVIES / DAVID EDELSTEINTHE NIGHTINGALE
DIRECTED BY JENNIFER
KENT. IFC FILMS. R.
FOR SAMA
DIRECTED BY WAAD
AL-KATEAB AND
EDWARD WATTS.
PBS DISTRIBUTION. NR.